The Essence of the Thing Read online

  29

  ‘Where have you been all this time?’

  ‘I’ve been fetching Henrietta.’

  ‘But you’ve been gone for ages.’

  ‘Well I stayed for a drink with Louisa.’

  ‘Yes, but still.’

  ‘It’s nice to be missed.’

  ‘I couldn’t find the whatsit.’

  ‘Poor you.’

  ‘You left here before teatime.’

  ‘Oh, yes, well, I popped in on Nicola.’

  ‘Nicola? Why did you do that?’

  ‘I’ll explain later, I have to bathe Henrietta.’

  ‘Why isn’t Marie-Laure giving me my bath?’

  ‘See if you can guess.’

  ‘She’s got a pain.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’s lost.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’s gone to her English class.’

  ‘No, silly, not on Sunday. It’s her day off.’

  ‘When’s she coming back?’

  ‘After you’ve gone to bed.’

  ‘I’m going to wait up for her.’

  ‘No you’re not. She’ll be very late.’

  ‘Fergus is allowed to stay up late. Fergus stays up till midnight, every night.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘He does, he told me.’

  ‘Good old Fergus. Come on, out you get.’

  ‘Mummy.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why do I have to be good?’

  ‘We all have to be good.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There is a reason, but I’ve forgotten it.’

  ‘Merember it.’

  ‘I’ll try. Daddy will remember it—you can ask him. Now quick, nightie on. Dressing gown. Slippers. Good girl.’

  Henrietta was eating her supper at the kitchen table.

  ‘Daddy.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why do I have to be good?’

  ‘Ask Mummy.’

  ‘She’s forgotten. She said to ask you.’

  ‘Ah. Let me think. Ah, yes. Because…’

  ‘Because why?’

  ‘I don’t buy ice-creams for bad girls.’

  Henrietta thought for a moment. ‘When I grow up,’ she said, ‘I’m going to be bad, because then I’ll have my own money, and I can buy my own ice-cream. I’m going to be bad, and buy my own ice-cream.’

  ‘Well, that sounds reasonable enough,’ said Alfred. ‘But meanwhile, you’ll have to be good, is that understood?’

  ‘All right,’ said Henrietta reluctantly. ‘But only until I grow up.’

  Soon after this she went to bed, and Alfred read her some Winnie the Pooh, and she fell asleep just as Kanga…

  30

  ‘Why did you go to see Nicola?’

  ‘Because she’s sad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t tell a soul. I probably shouldn’t tell even you.’

  ‘Fire ahead then.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘Jonathan’s got cold feet.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Bloody Jonathan has handed Nicola her cards.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘He’s offered to buy her out. The show’s over. He’s given her the elbow.’

  ‘Was he there?’

  ‘No, of course not. He delivered the blow and then more or less bashed off immediately to his parents’ for the weekend. She’s hoping to bring him round, but it doesn’t really look likely, does it?’

  ‘Bloody Jonathan. How very unfortunate.’

  ‘Yes, so say I.’

  ‘I thought they were a permanent fixture.’

  ‘Yes, naturally.’

  ‘Awkward, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘I thought she was his salvation.’

  ‘Perhaps he doesn’t want to be saved.’

  ‘Or he doesn’t believe that she can save him.’

  ‘Perhaps she can’t, at that.’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Only God; as usual. In any event, they won’t be coming with us to the cottage at Easter, so I thought we might take Fergus.’

  ‘Oh, God, must we?’

  ‘Yes, Louisa’s looking awfully peaky; she and Robert could probably use a break. Anyway, it’s nice for Harry to have another kid to play with.’

  ‘All right, let’s bite the bullet, then.’

  So that was what they did.

  31

  Nicola lay under the bedclothes, hunched around her pain, despising herself.

  She despised herself for her failure to oppose Jonathan’s frozen blankness with the tears and shrieks which would have expressed her true feelings. She despised herself for the mean little sarcasms which had been her only mode of attack—she despised herself even though these slights had found their petty targets, because the wounded pride to which they gave expression was—or ought to be—the least of her complaints. She believed that the wound Jonathan had dealt to her heart (her truly loving, trusting, faithful heart) was a more serious and more honourable wound than that to her self-esteem. She supposed these two could be differentiated, and so long as they could, she had shown him nothing of the real pain she was suffering. In the face of his cast-iron indifference she was apparently as dumb and cold as he. She despised herself for this dumb coldness. She had never before so plainly been shown the difficulty, the near-impossibility, of speaking truly to an interlocutor who will not hear, but she knew one must attempt it nevertheless, and thus far she had failed even to make the attempt. She swore she would make it on the morrow, and at last, wretched, now, beyond tears, she slept.

  She left the flat on Monday morning long before her usual time, and when she got to Fitzrovia, where she worked, she found an empty table in a coffee shop. She ordered a large filter coffee and a croissant. (Hugh would have been delighted: what had he told you? There!) She took a long time eating it and then she smoked a cigarette. She might do this every morning now. She was free to do exactly as she pleased, now, almost whenever it pleased her. She need never think of Jonathan at all. She was free, she was horribly, abominably free. Was this, in fact, what Jonathan himself wanted? This freedom, this horrible, this abominable freedom? She would, she swore, find out. She would see.

  Jonathan did not return to the flat that evening until after nine o’clock. It could be supposed that he had eaten dinner somewhere else.

  Nicola was in the sitting room. ‘Jonathan,’ she called, hearing him enter. ‘Could you come in here? I have to talk to you.’ But she did not imagine that the irony was evident to him.

  He stood, as had she, in the sitting-room doorway, looking not startled but tired and drawn. ‘What is it?’ he said.

  She got up. ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Sit down.’

  He entered the room with a terrible reluctance.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said again. ‘Don’t make this worse than it is.’

  He sat down. ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  ‘The truth,’ she replied.

  ‘I’ve already told it you,’ he said. He moved slightly as if to get up.

  ‘The whole truth,’ she said. ‘All of it. I have to know.’

  ‘This is useless. I have nothing more to tell you. I’m sorry, I wish I had. I wish I could satisfy your curiosity, but I can’t. There is nothing more to know. I’ll speak as plainly as I can. I’m sorry that you find this so hard to take in, but I don’t want to live with you any longer. This relationship is getting us nowhere. I don’t love you.’

  She was silenced; she felt almost faint. He had said the words. Black silence surrounded her. She sat down: she was faint.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But that is the truth. You asked for it. Oh, by the way, that agent came—they’ll send a written valuation, it should turn up in the next day or so. Then we can get cracking. Meanwhile, if you have no further questions, I’ll leave you—I’ve got some work to look at.’

  ‘Can you remember,�
�� said Nicola, fighting for her life, ‘when you last made love to me? Can you remember when that was?’

  He shrugged dismissively and pulled a face; the question was out of order, it was in poor taste.

  ‘I can,’ she went on. ‘It was just a week ago. Last Monday night. Three nights before you told me to get on my bike. Which means, that in only three days, just three days—’

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Jonathan. ‘That means nothing. Sex. That’s a quite separate matter. It means absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with love.’

  The thing to do—this at least she had grasped—was not to be deflected from the chief issue, not to be diverted by surprise or anger from the line she meant to and must pursue.

  ‘You can’t mean this,’ she said. ‘You can’t possibly mean this.’

  He shrugged again, as if to say, have it your way; say what you like; I know what I mean.

  ‘You must have forgotten everything,’ she said. Her voice rose. ‘That it had everything to do with love was always the whole point. You can’t have forgotten, you can’t.’

  Still he said nothing; he even turned his head away, impatient to be gone.

  32

  That sex had everything to do with love had always been the whole point. It had always been perfectly evident to Nicola that one could not have sexual intercourse with a person one did not seriously love: it was a physical and spiritual impossibility, and the more she witnessed of the readiness of other human beings to disprove this contention the more incredulous she grew, until she could only at last shrug and say to herself, so be it. Nicola could not even imagine how—physically, spiritually—one might so much as take off all one’s clothes in front of—that is, for—a man (or, as the case might be, a woman) whom one did not truly, deeply, and with all one’s heart know, and trust, and love. The imperative seemed to be physiological as much as it was moral. But as the years had gone by she had never managed to encounter anyone who truly shared these scruples. She had begun to think that there might be something significantly abnormal about her, physiologically or morally or spiritually, but she dressed up and went out when invited to do so nonetheless, hoping for enlightenment from one direction or another.

  Two years ago she had gone in just such a mood of wary optimism to a rather rowdy party—she was getting just a little too old for this sort of thing—in Fulham. She was wearing a very short red skirt, and she had a red feather boa round her neck. Some time after midnight a heavy young man had stumbled or been pushed against a table in the kitchen and several glasses had crashed to the floor. Nicola had been getting herself a drink of water from the kitchen tap. She managed to herd the several people in the room out of it and back into the melee, and then she hunted down the dustpan and broom, and began to sweep up the broken glass. She had just crawled back out from under the kitchen table, dustpan in hand, when a voice from the doorway asked if she needed any help.

  ‘Do you think you could try and find some newspaper?’ she said, looking up at a rather tall, rather diffident-seeming, rather angelic-looking stranger.

  He entered the room gingerly, wary of the remaining broken glass, and began opening cupboards and peering into them. In due course he found a section of the previous week’s Sunday Times, and helped her to wrap up the broken glass, which he deposited in the waste bin. Then he held out his hand to her. ‘Jonathan Finch,’ he said.

  ‘Nicola,’ she replied; ‘Gatling.’

  ‘Like the gun,’ he said.

  ‘Like the bird,’ she replied.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you get fed up,’ he said. ‘Everyone must say that.’

  ‘Almost everyone,’ she said.

  ‘Are those gatling feathers?’ he said, looking at the feather boa.

  She laughed.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ he said.

  ‘I was just about to leave,’ she replied. ‘I never stay long after the first breakage.’

  ‘I couldn’t offer you a lift, could I?’ he asked. ‘I’ve only had one drink—I haven’t been here long; I came on from the theatre.’

  ‘Oh, you’re a surgeon, are you?’ she asked. ‘Was it an emergency?’

  He looked astounded and then laughed. ‘The West End theatre,’ he said.

  It was even less Jonathan’s sort of party than it was Nicola’s, but he’d been brought by the girl he’d taken to the theatre. He wouldn’t have come, but there was a great hole in the middle of his life; he’d only just lately noticed it, and it was beginning to worry him. There was something he hadn’t understood, or noticed, or reckoned on, and now that he was aware of the fact he was inclined to go wherever—within reason—fate suggested, hoping to find a clue. It was the most imaginative decision he’d made since his distant, so different, adolescence. And now, striking up this acquaintance with this girl in a red feather boa, moving in so fast: it was so entirely out of character—as previously delineated, since the beginning of maturity at all events—but there was your answer: he’d been right to come here after all.

  ‘But did you come here by yourself?’ she said.

  ‘No, that’s all right,’ he replied. ‘The girl I came with lives upstairs—I’ll just say goodbye to her. She wasn’t really expecting me to stay long. We’re just—friends.’

  ‘If she really won’t mind,’ said Nicola. ‘If you’re sure.’

  It wasn’t the feather boa, it was, to begin with, her legs, and then, when she’d stood up, that rather grave little face. Well, it was, perhaps, the combination, of that red feather boa and that grave little face. He couldn’t wait to get her away from all this noise and music and hectic activity.

  33

  He drove her, pretty fast, to Notting Hill and they chatted a little on the way; they discovered each other’s occupations, but very little more. Nicola, glad simply to have been taken home without the trouble of finding a taxi, thanked him very much and went up to bed. A very nice-looking, possibly somewhat inhibited, probably rather dull chap whom I’ll never see again, she thought, but it was awfully lucky he turned up like that.

  In the middle of the week he telephoned her at work. So he’d been paying more than casual attention when quizzing her according to the usual polite formula: she was disconcerted. They met for a drink in a wine bar in Charlotte Street. Later that evening they found themselves dining together: it looked as if they might be getting on rather well. He was still very nice-looking—not to say, rather angelic—and might be somewhat inhibited, for all one knew, but it wouldn’t be correct to call him dull.

  Without the feathers, in her working clothes, she was still grave, still the sort of girl who’d sweep up the broken glass at a rowdy party before it caused a nasty accident: she had an edge of fastidiousness which was a challenge to him, and Jonathan was no stranger to challenge; a challenge was something he could respect.

  After a few weeks he began to ask himself, wonderingly, if the feeling which seemed to be growing in him indicated that he was falling in love: because he hadn’t heretofore believed that this was a thing one really did; he’d come to suppose that it was something done only by characters in fairytales.

  They went on seeing each other; there were so many things to do—London was one immense cornucopia of inducements to be enthralled; even quite speechlessly to marvel. He’d never quite apprehended this before. The whole city was in actuality a great pleasure garden; it had obviously—but in secret—been designed expressly in order to entice its denizens into the silken bonds of love. Now he saw at last what everyone else had always, plainly, understood, that it was no mistake after all that Alfred Gilbert’s famous statue at the very centre of the whole glittering maelstrom should have come to be known as Eros. The inconclusive, aborted infatuations he’d felt in the past for other women had been like the attempts of infant children to talk: what he felt now had brought him to the verge of true language. And yet, as the weeks went by, he did not speak.

  Nicola began nonetheless to be sure that he would: Nicola had very quietly and distinct
ly apprehended that Jonathan was—very probably—the last remaining male of her own circumspect species. They were like those frail animals one sees in television documentaries: crowded out by other stronger and more successful competitors, they hunt for each other, trying (before it is too late) to mate.

  The ritual (they might be the very last of their species to perform it) continued over a period of some months, stage by delicate stage; at last they found themselves sweltering together in the heat of a black July night. They’d been to a concert on the South Bank, and now they were in Nicola’s sitting room, drinking iced tea.

  34

  ‘Be quiet a moment. Listen. Can you hear that saxaphone? There. Did you hear?’

  ‘Yes. Nice.’ They were silent again, listening.

  ‘That’s “Summertime”, isn’t it?’

  ‘I believe you’re right. Goodness, how corny.’

  ‘No, it’s nice. Do you think he’s all alone?’

  ‘It might be a she.’

  ‘Women don’t play the saxophone.’

  ‘Are you quite sure about that?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘Let’s go and look out the back and see if we can see him. Her.’

  ‘It’s probably a record.’

  ‘No, it’s solo.’

  ‘It might still be a record.’

  ‘Let’s go and look.’

  Nicola jumped up from the old rickety sofa and went into the bedroom and Jonathan followed. They leaned out of the window and saw only trees, thickly in leaf, and a light shining out onto the balcony of the first-floor flat in the next-door house.

  ‘I think it’s actually coming from there.’

  They listened again. ‘Summertime’ ended, and the player paused for breath, or refreshment; the nearby darkness was silent except for a very faint stirring in the leaves.

  ‘It’s much cooler in here,’ Nicola remarked.

  ‘It would be, it faces north,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Let’s stay in here,’ said Nicola, sitting down on the end of the bed. ‘There might be more music in a minute.’